How did these cards perform against each other when running 3DMark2000? This benchmark is a very good video card benchmark because, depending on which benchmarks you run from it, it can report the performance level of your whole system or just a single part of your system (i.e. video card).

Here, we can see that the Geforce2 GTS card simply takes over in terms of performance, especially in higher resolutions. The MX card can still put out some impressive numbers, but when put side by side with a Geforce2 GTS, it just doesn't seem as impressive. The much older TNT2 Pro card's score is about half of the Geforce2 GTS's, while the Geforce2 MX seems to be in the middle grounds.

As you can see, the Geforce2 GTS card from PowerColor was unable to complete the test under 1600x1200 at 32-bit color. I'm not sure what the cause of this is, as switching drivers from both 5.xx and 6.xx didn't do anything. I'm suspecting that this is a problem with the PowerColor card that I received because even the less-powerful TNT2 Pro and Geforce2 MX cards were able to run at this resolution.

With the numbers that we have, however, we see the same pattern with the Geforce2 GTS take a considerable lead. The MX is once again acting as a "bridge" between the Geforce2 GTS and the much older TNT2 Pro. In resolutions as high as 1600x1200, we begin to see that both the Geforce2 MX and TNT2 Pro shrivel down to a score of less than 1000, which is not something to be proud of.

Also, in 1600x1200, we see that the difference between the Geforce2 MX and TNT2 Pro is closer than at all the other resolutions. My take on this is because both cards ran out of memory on their own on-board 32MB and are resorting to the much slower AGP bus for texture storage. The fact that the Geforce2 MX and GTS cards run only using AGP 1X furthur reduces performance for these cards at such high resolutions. If we were to be able to receive scores from the Geforce2 GTS card at this resolution, we should also see a similar pattern where its performance dips considerably compared to the other resolutions. A 64MB version of these cards would help to improve numbers in this situation.

On to: Benchmark Results - Quake 3 Arena